new stuff, but not much. What I want to know, Kit and the rest of you, is there anything
there that looks as though it was supposed to handle our new baby? Don’t see anything,
myself.”
“There is not,” Kit stated, definitely. “We looked. There couldn’t be, anyway. It
can’t be handled. Looking backwards at it, they may be able to reconstruct how it was
done, but in advance? No. Even Mentor couldn’t—he had to call in a fellow who has
studied ultra-high mathematics for Klono-only-knows-how-many-millions of years to
compute the resultant vectors.”
Kit’s use of the word “they”, which of course meant Ploorans to everyone except
his sisters, concealed his knowledge of the fact that the Eddorians had taken over the
defense of Floor. Eddorians were handling those screens. Eddorians were directing and
correlating those far-flung task forces, with a precision which Kinnison soon noticed.
“Much smoother work than I ever saw them do before,” he commented.
“Suppose they have developed a Z9M9Z?”
“Could be. They copied everything else you invented, why not that?” Again the
highly ambiguous “they”. “No sign of it around Arisia, though—but maybe they didn’t
think they’d need it there.”
“Or, more likely, they didn’t want to risk it so far from home. We can tell better
after the mopping-up starts—if the widget performs as per specs . . . but if your dope is
right, this is about close enough. You might tip the boys off, and I’ll call Mentor.”
Kinnison could not reach Nth space, but it was no secret that Kit could.
The terminus of one of the Patrol’s hyper-spatial tubes erupted into space close
to Ploor. That such phenomena were expected was evident—a Boskonian fleet moved
promptly and smoothly to englobe it. But this was an Arisian tube; computed, installed,
and handled by Arisians. It would be in existence only three seconds; and anything the
fleet could do, even if it got there in nothing flat, would make no difference.
To the observers in the Z9M9Z those three seconds stretched endlessly. What
would happen when that utterly foreign planet, with its absolutely impossible intrinsic
velocity of over fifteen times that of light, erupted into normal space and went inert?
Nobody, not even the Arisian, knew.
Everybody there had seen pictures of what happened when the insignificant
mass of a space-ship, traveling at only a hundredth of the velocity of light, collided with
a planetoid. That was bad enough. This projectile, however, had a mass of about eight
times ten to the twenty-first power—an eight followed by twenty-one zeroes—metric
tons; would tend to travel fifteen hundred times as fast; and kinetic energy equals mass
times velocity squared.
There seemed to be a theoretical possibility, since the mass would
instantaneously become some higher order of infinity, that all the matter in normal
space would coalesce with it in zero time; but Mentor had assured Kit that operators
would come into effect to prevent such an occurrence, and that untoward events would
be limited to a radius of ten or fifteen parsecs. Mentor could solve the problem in detail;
but since the solution would require some two hundred Klovian years and the event was
due to occur in two weeks . . .
“How about the big computer at Ultra Prime?” Kinnison had asked, innocently.
“You know how fast that works.”
“Roughly two thousand years—if it could take that kind of math, which it can’t,”
Kit had replied, and the subject had been dropped.
Finally it happened. What happened? Even after the fact none of the observers
knew; nor did any except the L3’s ever find out. The fuses of all the recorder and
analyzer circuits blew at once. Needles jumped instantly to maximum and wrapped
themselves around their stops. Charts and ultra-photographic films showed only straight
or curved lines running from the origin to and through the limits in zero time. Floor and
everything around it disappeared in an utterly indescribable and completely
incomprehensible blast of pure, wild, raw, uncontrolled and uncontrollable energy. The
infinitesimal fraction of that energy which was visible, heterodyned upon the ultra as it
was and screened as it was, blazed so savagely upon the plates that it seared the eyes.
And if the events caused by the planet aimed at Floor were indescribable, what
can be said of those initiated by the one directed against Floor’s sun?
When the heat generated in the interior of a sun becomes greater than its
effective surface is able to radiate, that surface expands. If the expansion is not fast
enough, a more or less insignificant amount of the sun’s material explodes, thus
enlarging by force the radiant surface to whatever extent is necessary to restore
equilibrium. Thus come into being the ordinary novae; suns which may for a few days or
for a few weeks radiate energy at a rate a few hundreds of thousands of times greater
than normal. Since ordinary novae can be produced at will by the collision of a planet
with a sun, the scientists of the Patrol had long since completed their studies of all the
phenomena involved.
The mechanisms of super-novae, however, remained obscure. No adequate
instrumentation had been developed to study conclusively the occasional super-nova
which occurred naturally. No super-nova had ever been produced artificially—with all its
resources of mass, atomic energy, cosmic energy, and sunbeams, Civilization could
neither assemble nor concentrate enough power.
At the impact of the second loose planet, accompanied by the excess energy of
its impossible and unattainable intrinsic velocity, Floor’s sun became a super-nova. How
deeply the intruding thing penetrated, how much of the sun’s mass exploded, never was
and perhaps never will be determined. The violence of the explosion was such,
however, that Klovian astronomers reported—a few years later—that it was radiating
energy at the rate of some five hundred and fifty million suns.
Thus no attempt will be made to describe what happened when the planet from
Nth space struck the Boskonians’ sun. It was indescribability cubed.
CHAPTER 27: KINNISON TRAPPED
The Boskonian fleets defending floor were not all destroyed, of course. The
vessels were inertialess. None of the phenomena accompanying the coming into being
of the super-nova were propagated at a velocity above that of light; a speed which to
any space-ship is scarcely a crawl.
The survivors were, however, disorganized. They had lost their morale when
Floor was wiped out in such a spectacularly nerve-shattering fashion. Also, they had
lost practically all of their high command; for the bosses, instead of riding the ether as
did the Patrol commanders, remained in their supposedly secure headquarters and
directed matters from afar. Mentor and his fellows had removed from this plane of
existence the Eddorians who had been present in the flesh on Floor. The Arisians had
cut all communication between Eddore and the remnants of the Boskonian defensive
force.
Grand Fleet, then, moved in for the kill; and for a time the action near Arisia was
repeated. Following definite flight-and-course orders from the Z9M9Z, ten or more
Patrol fleets would make short hops. At the end of those assigned courses they would
discover that they had englobed a task-force of the enemy. Bomb and beam!
Over and over—flit, bomb, and beam!
One Boskonian high officer, however, had both the time and the authority to act.
A full thousand fleets massed together, their heaviest units outward, packed together
screen to screen in a close-order globe of defense.
“According to Haynes, that was good strategy in the old days,” Kinnison
commented, “but it’s no good against loose planets and negaspheres.”
Six loose planets were so placed and so released that their inert masses would
crash together at the center of the Boskonian globe; then, a few minutes later, ten
negaspheres of high anti-mass were similarly launched. After those sixteen missiles had
done their work and the resultant had attained an equilibrium of sorts, there was very
little mopping-up to do.
The Boskonian observers were competent. The Boskonian commanders now
knew that they had no chance whatever of success; that to stay was to be annihilated;
that the only possibility of life lay in flight. Therefore each remaining Boskonian vice-
admiral, after perhaps a moment of consultation with a few others, ordered his fleet to
drive at maximum blast for his home planet.
“No use chasing them individually, is there, Kit?” Kinnison asked, when it became
clear in the tank that the real battle was over; that all resistance had ended. “They can’t
do anything, and this kind of killing makes me sick at the stomach. Besides, I’ve got
something else to do.”
“No. Me, too. So have I.” Kit agreed with his father in full.
As soon as the last Boskonian fleet was beyond detector range Grand Fleet
broke up, its component fleets setting out for their respective worlds.
“The Hell-Hole is still there, Kit,” the Gray Lensman said soberly. “If Floor was the
top—I’m beginning to think there is no top—it leads either to an automatic mechanism
set up by the Ploorans or to Ploorans who are still alive somewhere. If Floor wasn’t the