Kinnison looked at the tank, then around the full circle of the million-plug board encircling it. He observed the horde of operators, each one trying frantically to do something.
Next he shut his eyes, the better to perceive everything at once, and studied the problem for an hour.
“Attention, everybody!” he thought then. “Open all circuits—do nothing at all for a while.” He then called Haynes.
“I think we can clean this up if you’ll send over some Simplex analyzers and a crew of technicians. Helmuth had a nice set-up on multiplex controls, and Jalte had some ideas, too. If we add them to this we may have something.”
And by the time Worsel arrived, they did.
“Red lights are fleets already in motion,” Kinnison explained rapidly to the Velantian.
“Greens are fleets still at their bases. Ambers are the planets the -reds took off from connected, you see, by Ryerson string-lights. The white star is us, the Directrix. That violet cross ‘way over there is Jalte’s planet, our first objective. The pink comets are our free planets, their tails showing their intrinsic velocities. Being so slow, they had to start long ago. The purple circle is the negasphere. It’s on its way, too. You take that side, I’ll take this. They were supposed to start from the edge of the twelfth sector. The idea was to make it a smooth, bowl- shaped sweep across the galaxy, converging upon the objective, but each of the system marshals apparently wants to run this war to suit himself. Look at that guy there—he’s beating the gun by nine thousand parsecs. Watch me pin his ears back!”
He pointed his Simplex at the red light which had so offendingly sprung into being.
There was a whirring click and the number 449276 flashed above a board. An operator flicked a switch.
“Grand Fleet Operations!” Kinnison’s thought snapped across space. “Why are you taking off without orders?”
“Why, I. . . I’ll give you the marshal, sir . . .”
“No time! Tell your marshal that one more such break will put him in irons. Land at once! GFO—off.
“With around a million fleets to handle we can’t spend much time on any one,” he thought at Worsel. “But after we get them lined up and get our Rigellians broken in, it wont” be so bad.”
The breaking in did not take long; definite and meaningful orders flew faster and faster along the tiny, but steel-hard beams of the communicators.
“Take off . . . Increase drive four point five . . . Decrease drive two point eight . . .
Change course to . .” and so it went, hour after hour and day after day.
And with the passage of time came order out of chaos. The red lights formed a gigantically sweeping, curving wall; its almost imperceptible forward crawl representing an actual velocity of almost a hundred parsecs an hour. Behind that wall blazed a sea of amber, threaded throughout with the brilliant filaments which were the Ryerson lights. Ahead of it lay a sparkling, almost solid blaze of green. Closer and closer the wall crept toward the bright white star.
And in the “reducer”—the standard, ten-foot tank in the lower well—the entire spectacle was reproduced in miniature. It was plainer there, clearer and much more readily seen: but it was so crowded that details were indistinguishable.
Haynes stood beside Kinnison’s padded chair one day, staring up into the immense lens and shaking his head. He went down the flight of stairs to the reducer, studied that, and again shook his head.
“This is very pretty, but it doesn’t mean a thing,” he thought at Kinnison. “It begins to look as though I’m going along just for the ride. You—or you and Worsel—will have to do the fighting, too, I’m afraid.”
“Uh-uh,” Kinnison demurred. “What do we—or anyone else—know about tactics, compared to you? You’ve got to be the brains. That’s why we had the boys rig up the original working model there, for a reducer. On that you can watch the gross developments and tell us in general terms what to do. Knowing that, well know who ought to do what, from the big chart here, and pass your orders along.”
“Say, that will work, at that!” and Haynes brightened visibly. “Looks as though a couple of those reds are going to knock our star out of the tank, doesn’t it?”
“It’ll be close in that reducer—they’ll probably touch. Close enough in real space—less than three parsecs.”
The zero hour came and the Tellurian armada of eighty one sleek space-ships—eighty super-dreadnoughts and the Directrix—spurned Earth and took its place in that hurtling wall of crimson. Solar system after solar system was passed: fleet after fleet leaped into the ether and fitted itself into the smoothly geometrical pattern which Grand Fleet Operations was nursing along so carefully.
Through the galaxy the formation swept and out of it, toward a star cluster. It slowed its mad pace, the center hanging back, the edges advancing and folding in.
“Surround the cluster and close in,” the admiral directed; and, under the guidance now of two hundred Rigellians, Civilization’s vast Grand Fleet closed smoothly in and went inert.
Drivers flared white as they fought to match the intrinsic velocity of the cluster.
“Marshals of all system-fleets, attention! Using secondaries only, fire at will upon any enemy object coming within range. Engage outlying structures and such battle craft as may appear. Keep assigned distance from planet and stiffen cosmic screens to maximum.
Haynes—off!”
From millions upon millions of projectors there raved out gigantic rods, knives, and needles of force, under the impact of which the defensive screens of Jalte’s guardian citadels flamed into terrible refulgence. Duodec bombs were hurled —tight-beam-directed monsters of destruction which, looping around in vast circles to attain the highest possible measure of momentum, flung themselves against Boskone’s defenses in Herculean attempts to smash them down. They exploded; each as it burst filling all nearby space with blindingly intense violet light and with flying scraps of metal. Q-type helices, driven with all the frightful kilowattage possible to Medonian conductors and insulation, screwed in; biting, gouging, tearing in wild abandon.
Shear-planes, hellish knives of force beside which Tellurian lightning is pale and wan, struck and struck and struck again—fiendishly, crunchingly.
But those grimly stolid fortresses could take it. They had been repowered; their defenses stiffened to such might as to defy, in the opinion of Boskone’s experts, any projectors capable of being mounted upon mobile bases. And not only could they take it—those formidably armed and armored planetoids could dish it out as well. The screens of the Patrol ships flared high into the spectrum under the crushing force of sheer enemy power. Not a few of those defenses were battered down, clear to the wall-shields, before the unimaginable ferocity of the Boskonian projectors could be neutralized.
And at this spectacularly frightful deep-space engagement Galactic Director Jalte, and through him Eichmil, First of Boskone itself, stared in stunned surprise.
“It is insane!” Jalte gloated. “The fools judged our strength by that of Helmuth, not considering that we, as well as they, would be both learning and doing during the intervening time. They have a myriad of ships, but mere numbers will never conquer my outposts, to say nothing of my works here.”
“They are not fools. I am not so sure . . .” Eichmil cogitated.
He would have been even less sure could he have listened to a conversation which was even then being held.
“QX, Thorndyke?” Kinnison asked.
“On the green,” came instant reply. “Intrinsic, placement, releases—everything on the green.”
“Cut!” and the lone purple circle disappeared from tank and from reducer. The master technician had cut his controls and every pound of metal and other substance surrounding the negasphere had fallen into that enigmatic realm of nothingness. No connection or contact with it was now possible; and with its carefully established intrinsic velocity it rushed engulfingly toward the doomed planet One of the mastodonic fortresses, lying in its path, vanished utterly, with nothing save a burst of invisible cosmics to mark its passing. It approached its goal. It was almost upon it before any of the defenders perceived it, and even then they could neither understand nor grasp it. All detectors and other warning devices remained static, but: “Look! There! Something’s coming!” an observer jittered, and Jalte swung his plate. He saw—nothing. Eichmil saw the same thing. There was nothing to see. A vast, intangible nothing—yet a nothing tangible enough to occult everything material in a full third of the cone of vision! Jalte’s operators hurled into it their mightiest beams. Nothing happened. They struck nothing and disappeared. They loosed their heaviest duodec torpedoes; gigantic missiles whose warheads contained enough of that frightfully violent detonate to disrupt a world. Nothing happened—not even an explosion. Not even the faintest flash of light. Shell and contents alike merely—and Oh! so incredibly peacefully!—ceased to exist There were important bursts of cosmics, but they were invisible and inaudible; and neither Jalte nor any member of his force was to live long enough to realize how terribly he had already been burned.