Capital ships and a few of the heaviest cruisers could mount screen generators able to carry that frightful load; but every smaller ship caught in that semi-solid rod of indescribably incandescent fury simply flared into nothingness.
But in the instant before the firing order was given-as though precisely timed, which in all probability was the case -the ever-watchful observers picked up two items of fact which made the new Admiral of the First Galactic Region cut his almost irresistible weapon and break up his Cone of Battle after only a few seconds of action: One: those three enigmatic cargo scows bad fallen apart before the beam reached them, and hundreds-yes, thousands-of small objects had hurtled radially outward, out well beyond the field of action of the Patrol’s beam, at a speed many times that of light. Two:
Kinnison’s forebodings had been prophetic. A swarm of Blacks, all small-must have been hidden right on Earth somewhere!-were already darting at the Hill from the south.
“Cease firing!” Clayton rapped into his microphone. The dreadful beam expired. “Break cone formation! Independent action-light cruisers and scouts, get those bombsl Heavy cruisers and battle cruisers, engage similar units of the Blacks, two to one if possible. Chicago and Boise, attack Black Number One. Bolivar and Himalaya, Number Two. Europa and Johannesburg, Number Three!”
Space was full of darting, flashing, madly warring ships. The three Black superdreadnaughts leaped forward as one. Their massed batteries of beams, precisely synchronized and aimed, lashed out as one at the nearest Patrol super heavy, the Boise. Under the vicious power of that beautifully-timed thrust that warship’s first, second, and third screens, her very wall-shield, flared through the spectrum and into the black. Her Chief Pilot, however, was fast-very fast-and he had a fraction of a second in which to work. Thus, practically in the instant of her wall-shield’s failure, she went free; and while she was holed badly and_put out of action, she was not blown out of space. In fact, it was learned later that she lost only forty men.
The Blacks were not as fortunate. The Chicago, now without a partner, joined beams with the Bolivar and the
Himalaya against Number Two; then, a short half-second later, with her other two sister-ships against Number Three. And in that very short space of time two Black super-dreadnaughts ceased utterly to be.
But also, in that scant second of time, Black Number One had all but disappeared! Her canny commander, with no stomach at all for odds of five to one against, had ordered flight at max; she was already one-sixtieth of a light-yearabout one hundred thousand million miles-away from the Earth and was devoting her every energy to the accumulation of still more distance.
“Bolivar! Himalaya!” Clayton barked savagely. “Get him!” He wanted intensely to join the chase, but he couldn’t. He had to stay here. And he didn’t have time even to swear. Instead, without a break, the words tripping over each other against his teeth:
“Chicago! Johannesburg! Europa! Act at will against heaviest craft left. Blast ‘em down!”
He gritted his teeth. The scouts and light cruisers were doing their damndest, but they were outnumbered three to one—Christ, what a lot of stuff was getting through! The Blacks wouldn’t last long, between the Hill and the heavies, but maybe long enough, at that-the Patrol globe was leaking like a sieve! He voiced a couple of bursts of deepspace profanity and, although he was almost afraid to look, sneaked a quick peek. to see bow much was left of the Hill. He looked-and stopped swearing in the middle of a fourletter Anglo-Saxon word.
What he saw simply did not make sense. Those Black bombs should have peeled the armor off of that mountain like the skin off of a nectarine and scattered it from the Pacific to the Mississippi. By now there should be a hole a mile deep where the Hill had been. But there wasn’t. The Hill was still there! It might have shrunk a little—Clayton couldn’t see very well because of the worse-than-incandescent radiance of the practically continuous, sense-battering, world-shaking atomic detonations-but the Hill was still there!
And as he stared, chilled and shaken, at that indescribably terrific spectacle, a Black cruiser, holed and helpless, fell toward that armored mountain with an acceleration starkly impossible to credit. And when it struck it did not penetrate, and splash, and crater, as it should have done. Instead, it simply spread out, in a thin layer, over an acre or so of the fortress’ steep and apparently still, armored surface!
“You saw that, Alex? Good. Otherwise you could scarcely believe it,” came Kinnison’s silent voice. “Tell all our ships to stay away. There’s a force of over a hundred thousand G’s acting in a direction normal to every point of our surface. The boys are giving it’ all the decrement they cansomewhere between distance cube and fourth power-but even so it’s pretty fierce stuff. How about the Bolivar and .the Himalaya? Not having much luck catching Mr. Black, are they?”
“Why, I don’t know. I’ll check . . . No, sir, they aren’t. They report that they are losing ground and will soon lose trace.”
“I was afraid so, from that shape. Rodebush was about the only one who saw it coming . . . well, we’ll have to redesign and rebuild . . . “
* * *
Port Admiral Kinnison, shortly after directing the foregoing thought, leaned back in his chair and smiled. The battle was practically over. The Hill had come through. TheRodebush-Bergenholm fields had held her together through the most God-awful session of saturation atomic bombing that any world had ever seen or that the mind of man had ever conceived. And the counter-forces had kept the interior rock from flowing like water. So far, so good.
Her original armor was gone. Converted into . . .what? For hundreds of feet inward from the surface she was hotter than the reacting slugs of the Hanfords. Delousing her would be a project, not an operation; millions of cubic yards of material would have to be hauled off into space with tractors and allowed to simmer for a few hundred years; but what of that?
Bergenholm had said that the fields would tend to prevent the radioactives from spreading, as they otherwise would-and Virgil Samms was still safe!
“Virge, my boy, come along.” He took the First Lensman by his good arm and lifted him out of his chair. “Old Doctor Kinnison’s peerless prescription for you and me is a big, thick, juicy, porterhouse steak.”
CHAPTER 8
That murderous attack upon Virgil Samms, and its countering by those new super-lawmen, the Lensmen, and by an entire task force of the North American Armed Forces, was news of Civilization-wide importance. As such, it filled every channel of Universal Telenews for an hour. Then, in stunning and crescendo succession, came the staccato reports of the creation of the Galactic Patrol, the mobilization – allegedly for maneuvers – of Galactic Patrol’s Grand Fleet, and the ultimately desperate and all-too-nearly successful attack upon The Hill.
“Just a second, folks; we’ll have it very shortly. You’ll see something that nobody ever saw before and that nobody will ever see again. We’re getting in as close as the Law will let us.” The eyes of Telenews’ ace reporter and the telephoto lens of his cameraman stared down from a scooter at the furiously smoking, sputteringly incandescent surface of Triplanetary’s ancient citadel; while upon dozens of worlds thousands of millions of people packed themselves tighter and tighter around tens of millions of visiplates and loudspeakers in order to see and to hear the tremendous news.
. .
“There it is, folks, look at it-the only really impregnable fortress ever built by man! A good many of our experts had it written off as obsolete, long ago, but it seems these Lensmen had something up their sleeves besides their arms, heh-heh! And speaking of Lensmen, they haven’t been throwing their weight around, so most of us haven’t noticed them very much, but this reporter wants to go on record right now as saying there must be a lot more to the Lens than any of us has thought, because otherwise nobody would have gone to all that trouble and expense, to say nothing of the tremendous loss of life, just to kill the Chief Lensman, which seems to have been what they were after.
“We told you a few minutes ago, you know, that every Continent of Civilization sent official messages denying most emphatically any connection with this outrage. It’s still a mystery, folks; in fact, it is getting more and more mysterious all the time. Not one single man of the Black Fleet was taken alive! Not even in the ships that were only holed-they blew themselves up! And there were no uniforms or books or anything of the kind to be found in any of the wrecks-no identification whatever!
“And now for the scoop of all time! Universal Telenews has obtained permission to interview the two top -Lensmen, both of whom you all know-Virgil Samms and ‘Rod the Rock’ Kinnison-personally for this beam. We are now going down, by remote control, of course, right into the Galactic patrol office, right in The Hill itself. Here we are. Now if you will step just a little closer to the mike, please, Mr. Samms, or should I say . . .?”