Chapter 7

The Return to Ganymede

“Must you you go back to Ganymede?” Barkovis asked, slowly and thoughtfully. He was sitting upon a crystal bench beside the fountain, talking with Stevens, who, dressed in his bulging space-suit, stood near an airlock of the Forlorn Hope. “It seems a shame that you should face again those unknown, monstrous creatures who so inexcusably attacked us both without provocation.”

“I’m not so keen on it myself, but I can’t see any other way out of it,” the Terrestrial replied. “We left a lot of our equipment there, you know; and even if I should build duplicates here, it wouldn’t do us any good. These ten-nineteens are the most powerful transmitting tubes known when we left Tellus, but even their fields, dense as they are, can’t hold an ultra-beam together much farther than about six astronomical units. So you see we can’t possibly reach our friends from here with this tube; and your system of beam transmission won’t hold anything together even that far, and won’t work on any wave shorter than Roeser’s Rays. We may run into some more of those little spheres, though, and I don’t like the prospect. I wonder if we couldn’t plate a layer of that mirror of yours upon the Hope and carry along a few of those bombs? By the way, what is that explosive--or is it something beyond Tellurian chemistry?”

“Its structure should be clear to you, although you probably could not prepare it upon Tellus because of your high temperature. It is nothing but nitrogen--twenty-six atoms of nitrogen combined to form one molecule of what you would call--N-twenty-six?”

“Wow!” Stevens whistled. “Crystalline, pentavalent nitrogen--no wonder it’s violent!”

“We could, of course, cover your vessel with the mirror, but I am afraid that it would prove of little value. The plates are so hot that it would soon volatilize.”

“Not necessarily,” argued Stevens. “We could live in number one life-boat, and shut off the heat everywhere else. The life-boats are insulated from the structure proper, and the inner and outer walls of the structure are insulated from each other. With only the headquarters lifeboat warm, the outer wall could be held pretty close to zero absolute.”

“That is true. The bombs, of course, are controlled by radio, and therefore may be attached to the outer wall of your vessel. We shall be glad to do these small things for you.”

The heaters of the Forlorn Hope were shut off, and as soon as the outer shell had cooled to Titanian temperature, a corps of mechanics set to work. A machine very like a concrete mixer was rolled up beside the steel vessel, and into its capacious maw were dumped boxes and barrels of dry ingredients and many cans of sparkling liquid. The resultant paste was pumped upon the steel plating in a sluggish, viscid stream, which spread out into a thick and uniform coating beneath the flying rollers of the skilled Titanian workmen. As it hardened, the paste smoothed magically into the perfect mirror which covered the space-vessels of the satellite; and a full dozen of the mirror explosive bombs of this strange people were hung in the racks already provided.

“Once again I must caution you concerning those torpedoes,” Barkovis warned Stevens. “If you use them all, very well, but do not try to take even one of them into any region where it is very hot, for it will explode and demolish your vessel. If you do not use them, destroy them before you descend into the hot atmosphere of Ganymede. The mirror will volatilize harmlessly at the temperature of melting mercury, but the torpedoes must be destroyed. Once more, Tellurians, we thank you for what you have done, and wish you well.”

“Thanks a lot for your help--we still owe you something,” replied Stevens. “If either of your power-plants go sour on you again, or if you need any more built, be sure to let us know--you can come close enough to the inner planets now on your own beam to talk to us on the ultra-communicator. We’ll be glad to help you any way we can--and we may call on you for help again. Goodbye, Barkovis--goodbye, all Titania!”

He made his way through the bitterly cold shop into the control-room of their lifeboat, and while he was divesting himself of his heavy suit, Nadia lifted the Forlorn Hope into the blue-green sky of Titan, accompanied by an escort of the mirrored globes. Well clear of the atmosphere of the satellite, the terrestrial cruiser shot forward at normal acceleration, while the Titanian vessels halted and wove a pattern of blue and golden rays in salute to the departing guests.

“Well, Nadia, we’re off--on a long trek, too.”

“Said Wun Long Hop, the Chinese pee-lo,” Nadia agreed. “Sure everything’s all x, big boy?”

“To nineteen decimals,” he declared. “You couldn’t squeeze another frank into our accumulators with a proof-bar, and since they’re sending us all the power we want to draw, we won’t need to touch our batteries or tap our own beam until we’re almost to Jupiter. To cap the climax, what it takes to make big medicine on those spherical friends of ours, we’ve got. We’re not sitting on top of the world, ace--we’ve perched exactly at the apex of the entire universe!”

“How long is it going to take?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t figured it yet, but it’ll be beaucoup days,” and the two wanderers from far-distant Earth settled down to the routine of a long and uneventful journey.

They gave Saturn and his spectacular rings a wide berth and sped on, with ever-increasing velocity. Past the outer satellites, on and on, the good ship Forlorn Hope flew into the black-and-brilliant depths of interplanetary space. Saturn was an ever-diminishing disk beneath them: above them was Jupiter’s thin crescent, growing ever larger and more bright, and the Monarch of the Solar System, remaining almost stationary day after day, increasing steadily in apparent diameter and in brilliance.

Although the voyage from Titan to Ganymede was long, it was not monotonous, for there was much work to be done in the designing and fabrication of the various units which were to comprise the ultra-radio transmitting station. In the various compartments of the Forlorn Hope there were sundry small motors, blowers, coils, condensers, force-field generators, and other items which Stevens could use with little or no alteration; but for the most part he had to build everything himself. Thus it was that time passed quickly; so quickly that Jupiter loomed large and the Saturnian beam of power began to attenuate almost before the Terrestrials realized that their journey was drawing to an end.

“Our beam’s falling apart fast,” Stevens read his meters carefully, then swung his communicator beam toward Jupiter. “We aren’t getting quite enough power to hold our acceleration at normal--think I’ll cut now, while we’re still drawing enough to let the Titanians know we’re off their beam. We’ve got lots of power of our own now; and we’re getting pretty close to enemy territory, so they may locate that heavy beam. Have you found Ganymede yet?”

“Yes, it will be on the other side of Jupiter by the time we get there. Shall I detour, or put on a little more negative and wait for it to come around to this side?”

“Better wait, I think. The farther away we stay from Jupiter and the major satellites, the better.”

“All x--it’s on. Suppose we’d better start standing watches, in case some of them show up?”

“No use,” he dissented. “I’ve been afraid to put out our electro-magnetic detectors, as they could surely trace them in use. Without them, we couldn’t spot an enemy ship even if we were looking right at it, except by accident; since they won’t be lighted up and it’s awfully hard to see anything out here, anyway. We probably won’t know they’re within a million kilometers until they put a beam on us. Barkovis says that this mirror will reflect any beam they can use, and I’ve already got a set of photo-cells in circuit to ring an alarm at the first flash off of our mirror plating. I’d like to get in the first licks myself, but I haven’t been able to dope out any way of doing it. So you might as well sleep in your own room, as usual, and I’ll camp here right under the panel until we get to Ganymede. There’s a couple of little things I just thought of, though, that may help some; and I’m going to do ‘em right now.”

Putting on his space-suit, he picked up a power drill and went out into the bitter cold of the outer structure. There he attacked the inner wall of their vessel, and the carefully established inter-wall vacuum disappeared in a screaming hiss of air as the tempered point bit through plate after plate.

“What’s the idea, Steve?” Nadia asked, when he had re-entered the control room. “Now you’ll have all that pumping to do over again.”

“Protection for the mirrors,” he explained. “You see, they aren’t perfect reflectors. There’s a little absorption, so that some stuff comes through. Not much, of course; but enough to kill some of those Titanians and almost enough to ruin their ship got through in about ten minutes, and only one enemy was dealing it out. We can stand more than they could, of course, but the mirror itself won’t stand much more heat than it was absorbing then. But with air in those spaces instead of vacuum, and with the whole mass of the Hope, except this one lifeboat, as cold as it is, I figure that there’ll be enough conduction and convection through them to keep the outer wall and the mirror cold--cool enough, at least, to hold the mirror on for an hour. If only one ship tackles us, it won’t be bad--but I figure that if there’s only one, we’re lucky.”

Stevens’ fears were only too well grounded, for during the “evening” of the following day, while he was carefully scanning the heavens for some sign of enemy craft, the alarm bell over his head burst into its brazen clamor. Instantly he shot out the detectors and ultra-lights and saw not one, but six of the deadly globes--almost upon them, at point-blank range! One was already playing a beam of force upon the Forlorn Hope, and the other five went into action immediately upon feeling the detector impulses and perceiving that the weapon of their sister ship had encountered an unusual resistance in the material of that peculiarly mirrored wedge. As those terrific forces struck her, the terrestrial cruiser became a vast pyrotechnic set piece, a dazzling fountain of coruscant brilliance: for the mirror held. The enemy beams shot back upon themselves and rebounded in all directions, in the same spectacular exhibition of frenzied incandescence which had marked the resistance of the Titanian sphere to a similar attack.

But Stevens was not idle. In the instant of launching his detectors, as fast as he could work the trips, four of the frightful nitrogen bombs of Titan--all that he could handle at once--shot out into space, their rocket-tubes flaring viciously. The enemy detectors of course located the flying torpedoes immediately, but, contemptuous of material projectiles, the spheres made no attempt to dodge, but merely lashed out upon them with their ravening rays. So close was the range that they had no time to avoid the radio-directed bombs after discovering that their beams were useless against the unknown protective covering of those mirrored shells. There were four practically simultaneous detonations--silent, but terrific explosions as the pent-up internal energy of solid pentavalent nitrogen was instantaneously released--and the four insensately murderous spheres disappeared into jagged fragments of wreckage, flying wildly away from the centers of explosion. One great mass of riven and twisted metal was blown directly upon the fifth globe, and Nadia stared in horrified fascination at the silent crash as the entire side of the ship crumpled inward like a shell of cardboard under the awful impact. That vessel was probably out of action, but Stevens was taking no chances. As soon as he had clamped a pale blue tractor rod upon the sixth and last of the enemy fleet, he drove a torpedo through the gaping wall and into the interior of the helpless war-vessel. There he exploded it, and the awful charge, detonated in that confined space, literally tore the globular space-ship to bits.

“We’ll show these jaspers what kind of trees make shingles!” he gritted between clenched teeth; and his eyes, hard now as gray iron, fairly emitted sparks as he launched four torpedoes upon the sole remaining globe of the squadron of the void. “I’ve had a lot of curiosity to know just what kind of unnatural monstrosities can possibly have such fiendish dispositions as they’ve got--but beasts, men or devils, they’ll find they’ve grabbed something this time they can’t let go of,” and fierce blasts of energy ripped from the exhausts as he drove his missiles, at their highest possible acceleration, toward the captive sphere so savagely struggling at the extremity of his tractor beam.

But that one remaining vessel was to prove no such easy victim as had its sister ships. Being six to one, and supposedly invincible, the squadron had been overconfident and had attacked carelessly, with only its crippling slicing beams instead of its more deadly weapons of total destruction; and so fierce and hard had been Stevens’ counter-attack that five of its numbers had been destroyed before they realized what powerful armament was mounted by that apparently crude, helpless, and innocuous wedge. The sixth, however, was fully warned, and every resource at the command of its hellish crew was now being directed against the Forlorn Hope.

Sheets, cones, and gigantic rods of force flashed and crackled. Space was filled with silent, devastating tongues of flame. The Forlorn Hope was dragged about erratically as the sphere tried to dodge those hurtling torpedoes; tried to break away from the hawser of energy anchoring her so solidly to her opponent. But the linkage held, and closer and closer Stevens drove the fourfold menace of his frightful dirigible bombs. Pressor beams beat upon them in vain. Hard driven as those pushers were, they could find no footing, but were reflected at many angles by that untouchable mirror and their utmost force scarcely impeded the progress of the rocket-propelled missiles. Comparatively small as the projectiles were, however, they soon felt the effects of the prodigious beams of heat enveloping them, and torpedo after torpedo exploded harmlessly in space as their mirrors warmed up and volatilized. But for each bomb that was lost, Stevens launched another, and each one came closer to its objective than had its predecessor.

Made desperate by the failure of his every beam, the enemy commander thought to use material projectiles himself--weapons abandoned long since by his race as antiquated and inefficient, but a few of which were still carried by the older types of vessels. One such shell was found and launched--but in the instant of its launching Stevens’ foremost bomb struck its mark and exploded. So close were the other three bombs, that they also let go at the shock; and the warlike sphere, hemmed in by four centers of explosions, flew apart--literally pulverized. Its projectile, so barely discharged, did not explode--it was loaded with material which could be detonated only by the warhead upon impact or by a radio signal. It was, however, deflected markedly from its course by the force of the blast, so that instead of striking the Forlorn Hope in direct central impact, its head merely touched the apex of the mirror-plated wedge. That touch was enough. There was another appalling concussion, another blinding glare, and the entire front quarter of the terrestrial vessel had gone to join the shattered globes.

Between the point of explosion and the lifeboats there had been many channels of insulation, many bulkheads, many air-breaks, and compartment after compartment of accumulator cells. These had borne the brunt of the explosion, so that the control room was unharmed, and Stevens swung his communicator rapidly through the damaged portions of the vessels.

“How badly are we hurt, Steve--can we make it to Ganymede?”

Nadia was quietly staring over his shoulder into the plate, studying with him the pictures of destruction there portrayed as he flashed the projector from compartment to compartment.

“We’re hurt--no fooling--but it might have been a lot worse,” he replied, as he completed the survey. “We’ve lost about all of our accumulators, but we can land on our own beam, and landing power is all we want, I think. You see, we’re drifting straight for where Ganymede will be, and we’d better cut out every bit of power we’re using, even the heaters, until we get there. This lifeboat will hold heat for quite a while, and I’d rather get pretty cold than meet any more of that gang. I figured eight hours just before they met us, and we were just about drifting then. I think it is safe to say seven hours blind.”