Read Ebook: Robot nemesis by Smith E E Edward Elmer Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 117 lines and 10246 words, and 3 pages

"I am convinced, really almost against my will." Martin frowned in thought. "However, convincing anyone else may prove difficult, especially as you insist upon secrecy."

"Don't try to convince anybody!" exclaimed the scientist. "Tell them that I'm building a communicator--tell them I'm an inventor working on a new ray-projector--tell them anything except the truth!"

"All right. I have sufficient authority to see that your requests are granted, I think."

And thus it came about that when the immense Terrestrial Contingent lifted itself into the air Ferdinand Stone was in his private laboratory in the flagship, surrounded by apparatus and equipment of his own designing, much of which was connected to special generators by leads heavy enough to carry their full output.

Earth some thirty hours beneath them, Stone felt himself become weightless. His ready suspicions blazed. He pressed Martin's combination upon his visiphone panel.

"What's the matter?" he rasped. "What're they down for?"

"It's nothing serious," the admiral assured him. "They're just waiting for additional instructions about our course in the maneuvers."

"Not serious, huh?" Stone grunted. "I'm not so sure of that. I want to talk to you, and this room's the only place I know where we'll be safe. Can you come down here right away?"

"Why, certainly," Martin assented.

"I never paid any attention to our course," the physicist snapped as his visitor entered the laboratory. "What was it?"

"Take-off exactly at midnight of June nineteenth," Martin recited, watching Stone draw a diagram upon a scratch-pad. "Rise vertically at one and one-half gravities until a velocity of one kilometer per second has been attained, then continue vertical rise at constant velocity. At 6:03:29 AM of June twenty-first head directly for the star Regulus at an acceleration of exactly nine hundred eighty centimeters per second. Hold this course for one hour, forty-two minutes, and thirty-five seconds; then drift. Further directions will be supplied as soon thereafter as the courses of the other fleets can be checked."

"Has anybody computed it?"

"Regardless, we'd better check on our course," Stone growled, unimpressed. "We'll compute it roughly, right here, and see where following these directions has put us." Taking up a slide-rule and a book of logarithms he set to work.

"That initial rise doesn't mean a thing," he commented after a while, "except to get us far enough away from Earth so that the gravity is small, and to conceal from the casual observer that the effective take-off is still exactly at midnight."

Stone busied himself with calculations for many minutes. He stroked his forehead and scowled.

Without reply Martin called the navigating room. "What do you think of this course, Henderson?" he asked.

"I do not like it, sir," the officer replied. "Relative to the sun we have a tangential velocity of only one point three centimeters per second, while our radial velocity toward it is very nearly fifty-three thousand meters per second. We will not be in any real danger for several days, but it should be borne in mind that we have no tangential velocity."

"You see, Stone, we are in no present danger," Martin pointed out, "and I am sure that Dos-Tev will send us additional instructions long before our situation becomes acute."

"I'm not," the pessimistic scientist grunted. "Anyway, I would advise calling some of the other Blue fleets on your scrambled wave, for a check-up."

"There would be no harm in that." Martin called the Communications Officer, and soon:

Every man visible in the plate was similarly affected--the entire Communications staff was in the same pitiable condition of utter helplessness. But Ferdinand Stone did not stare. A haze of livid light had appeared, gnawing viciously at his spherical protective screen, and he sprang instantly to his instruments.

"I can't say that I expected this particular development, but I know what they are doing and I am not surprised," Stone said, coolly. "They have discovered the thought band and are broadcasting such an interference on it that no human being not protected against it can think intelligently. There, I have expanded our zone to cover the whole ship. I hope that they don't find out for a few minutes that we are immune, and I don't think they can, as I have so adjusted the screen that it is now absorbing, instead of radiating.

"Tell the captain to put the ship into heaviest possible battle order, everything full on, as soon as the men can handle themselves. Then I want to make a few suggestions."

"What happened, anyway?" the Communications Officer, semi-conscious now, was demanding. "Something hit me and tore my brain all apart--I couldn't think, couldn't do a thing. My mind was all chewed up by curly pinwheels...." Throughout the vast battleship of space men raved briefly in delirium; but, the cause removed, recovery was rapid and complete. Martin explained matters to the captain, that worthy issued orders, and soon the flagship had in readiness all her weapons, both of defense and of offense.

"Doctor Stone, who knows more about the automatons than does any other human being, will tell us what to do next," the Flight Director said.

"The first thing to do is to locate them," Stone, now temporary commander, stated crisply. "They have taken over at least one of our vessels, probably one close to us, so as to be near the center of the formation. Radio room, put out tracers on wave point oh oh two seven one...." He went on to give exact and highly technical instructions as to the tuning of the detectors.

"But the men in her!" protested Martin.

"You intimated something about help," Martin suggested. "Can you release some of the other ships from the automaton's yoke, after all?"

"Got to--or roast. This is bound to be a battle of attrition--we can't crush her screens alone until her power is exhausted and we'll be in the sun long before then. I see only one possible way out. We'll have to build a neutralizing generator for every lifeboat this ship carries, and send each one out to release one other ship in our Fleet from the robot's grip. Eleven boats--that'll make twelve to concentrate on her--about all that could attack at once, anyway. That way will take so much time that it will certainly be touch-and-go, but it's the only thing we can do, as far as I can see. Give me ten good radio men and some mechanics, and we'll get at it."

While the technicians were coming on the run Stone issued final instructions:

That grizzled four-striper had been at a loss--knowing little indeed of the oscillatory nature of thought and still less of the abstruse mathematics in which Ferdinand Stone took such delight--but here was something that he understood thoroughly. He knew his ship, knew her every weapon and her every whim, knew to the final volt and to the ultimate ampere her Gargantuan capacity both to give it and to take it. He could fight his ship--and how he fought her!

Needle-rays and stabbingly penetrant stilettos of fire thrust and thrust again. Sizzling, flashing planes cut and slashed. The heaviest annihilating and disintegrating beams generable by man clawed and tore in wild abandon.

And over all and through all the stupendously powerful blanketing beams--so furiously driven that the coils and commutators of their generators fairly smoked and that the refractory throats of their projectors glared radiantly violet and began slowly, stubbornly to volatilize--raved out in all their pyrotechnically incandescent might, striving prodigiously to crush by their sheer power the shielding screens of the vessel of the automatons.

Captain Malcolm was burning his stores of fuel and munitions at an appalling rate, careless alike of exhaustion of reserves and of service-life of equipment. All his generators were running at a shockingly ruinous overload, his every projector was being used so mercilessly that not even their powerful refrigerators, radiating the transported heat into the interplanetary cold from the dark side of the ship, could keep their refractory linings in place for long.

They carried it while the computers, grim-faced and scowling now, jotted down from minute to minute the enormous and rapidly-increasing figure representing their radial velocity. Carried it while Earth's immense armada, manned by creatures incapable of even the simplest coherent thought or purposeful notion, plunged sickeningly downward in its madly hopeless fall, with scarcely a measurable trace of tangential velocity, toward the unimaginable inferno of the sun.

Eventually, however, the shielded lifeboats approached their objectives and expanded their screens to enclose them. Officers recovered, air-locks opened, and the lifeboats, still radiating protection, were taken inside. Explanations were made, orders were given, and one by one the eleven vengeful superdreadnaughts shot away to join their flagship in abating the Menace of the Machine.

No conceivable structure, however armed or powered, could long withstand the fury of the combined assault of twelve such superb battle craft, and under that awful concentration of force the screens of the doomed ship radiated higher and higher into the ultra-violet, went black, and failed. And, those mighty defenses down, the end was practically instantaneous.

No unprotected metal can endure even momentarily the ardor of such beams, and they played on, not only until every plate and girder of the vessel and every nut, bolt, and rivet of its monstrous crew had been blasted out of all semblance to what it had once been, but until every fragment of metal had not only been liquefied, but had been completely volatilized.

At the instant of cessation of the brain-scrambling activities of the automatons the Communications Officer had begun an insistent broadcast. Aboard all of the ships there were many who did not recover--who would be helpless imbeciles during the short period of life left to them--but soon an intelligent officer was at every control and each unit of the Terrestrial Contingent was exerting its maximum thrust at a right angle to its line of fall.

And now the burden was shifted from the fighting staff to the no less able engineers and computers. To the engineers the task of keeping their mighty engines in such tune as to maintain constantly the peak acceleration of three Earth gravities; to the computers that of so directing their ever-changing course as to win every possible centimeter of precious tangential velocity.

Ferdinand Stone was hollow-eyed and gaunt from his practically sleepless days and nights of toil, but he was as grimly resolute as ever. Struggling against the terrific weight of three gravities he made his way to the desk of the Chief Computer and waited while that worthy, whose leaden hands could scarcely manipulate the instruments of his profession, finished his seemingly endless calculations.

"We will escape the sun's mighty attraction, Doctor Stone, with approximately half a gravity to spare," the mathematician reported finally. "Whether we will be alive or not is another question. There will be heat, which our refrigerators may or may not be able to handle; there will be radiations which our armor may or may not be able to stop. You, of course, know a lot more about those things than I do."

"Distance at closest approach?" snapped Stone.

"Two point twenty-nine times ten to the ninth meters from the sun's center," the computer shot back instantly. "That is, one million five hundred ninety thousand kilometers--only two point twenty-seven radii--from the arbitrary surface. What do you think of our chances, sir?"

"It will probably be a near thing--very near," the physicist replied, thoughtfully. "Much, however, can be done. We can probably tune our defensive screens to block most of the harmful radiations, and we may be able to muster other defenses. I will analyze the radiations and see what we can do about neutralizing them."

"You will go to bed," directed Martin, crisply. "There will be lots of time for that work after you get rested up. The doctors have been reporting that the men who did not recover from the robots' broadcast are dying under this acceleration. With those facts staring us in the face, however, I do not see how we can reduce our power."

"We can't. As it is, many more of us will probably die before we get away from the sun," and Stone staggered away, practically asleep on his feet.

Day after day the frightful fall continued. The sun grew larger and larger, more and ever more menacingly intense. One by one at first, and then by scores, the mindless men of the Fleet died and were consigned to space--a man must be in full control of all his faculties to survive for long an acceleration of three gravities.

The generators of the defensive screens had early been tuned to neutralize as much as possible of Old Sol's most fervently harmful frequencies, and but for their mighty shields every man of the Fleet would have perished long since. Now even those ultra-powerful guards were proving inadequate.

Refrigerators were running at the highest possible overload and the men, pressing as closely as possible to the dark sides of their vessels, were availing themselves of such extra protection of lead shields and the like as could be improvised from whatever material was at hand.

Yet the already stifling air became hotter and hotter, eyes began to ache and burn, skins blistered and cracked under the punishing impact of forces which all the defenses could not block. But at last came the long-awaited announcement.

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