before. There were no indications that the thing had ever been enclosed, in whole or in
part. It certainly never had living quarters for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing eaters of
organic food.”
Sawtelle snorted. “You mean it never had a crew?” “Not necessarily . . .
“Bah! What other kind of intelligent life is there?”
“I don’t know. But before we speculate too much. let’s look at the tri-di. The camera
may have caught something I missed.”
It hadn’t. The three-dimensional pictures added nothing.
“It probably was operated either by programmed automatics or by remote control,”
Hilton decided, finally. “But how did they drain all our power? And just as bad, what and
how is that other point source of power we’re heading for now?” “What’s wrong with it?”
Sawtelle asked.
“Its strength. No matter what distance or reactant I assume, nothing we know will fit.
Neither fission nor fusion will do it. It has to be practically total conversion!”
Chapter 2
The Perseus snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and Hilton stared,
motionless and silent.
Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were bare, giant skeletons of steel,
like the “derelict” that had so unexpectedly blasted away from them. The others were
more or less like the Perseus, except in being bigger, faster and of vastly greater
power.
Beams of starkly incredible power bit at and clung to equally capable defensive
screens of pure force. As those inconceivable forces met, the glare of their
neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and skeletons alike were disappearing
in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers and sparkles of rended, fused and vaporized metal.
Hilton watched two ships combine against one skeleton. Dozens of beams, incredibly
tight and hard, were held inexorably upon dozens of the bulges of the skeleton.
Overloaded, the bulges’ screen flared through the spectrum and failed. And bare metal,
however refractory, endures only for instants under the appalling intensity of such
beams as those.
The skeletons tried to duplicate the ships’ method of attack, but failed. They were too
slow. Not slow, exactly, either, but hesitant; as though it required whole seconds for the
commander-or operator? Or remote controller?-of each skeleton to make it act. The
ships were winning.
“Hey!” Hilton yelped. “Oh-that’s the one we saw back there. But what in all space does
it think it’s doing?”
It was plunging at tremendous speed straight through the immense fleet of embattled
skeletons. It did not fire a beam nor energize a screen; it merely plunged along as
though on a plotted course until it collided with one of the skeletons of the fleet and
both structures plunged, a tangled mass of wreckage, to the ground of the planet
below.
Then hundreds of the ships shot forward, each to plunge into and explode inside one
of the skeletons. When visibility was restored another wave of ships came forward to
repeat the performance, but there was nothing left to fight. Every surviving skeleton had
blinked out of normal space.
The remaining ships made no effort to pursue the skeletons, nor did they re-form as a
fleet. Each ship went off by itself.
And on that distant planet of the Stretts the group of mechs watched with amazed
disbelief as light after light after light winked out on their two-miles-long control board.
Frantically they relayed orders to the skeletons; orders which did not affect the losses.
“Brain-pans will blacken for this . . .” a mental snarl began, to be interrupted by a coldly
imperious thought.
“That long-dead unit, so inexplicably reactivated, is approaching the fuel world. It is
ignoring the battle. It is heading through our fleet toward the Oman half . . . handle it,
ten eighteen !”
“It does not respond, Your Loftiness.”
“Then blast it, fool! Ah, it is inactivated. As encyclopedist, Nine, explain the freakish
behavior of that unit.”
“Yes, Your Loftiness. Many cycles ago we sent a ship against the Omans with a new
device of destruction. The Omans must have intercepted it, drained it of power and al-
lowed it to drift on. After all these cycles of time it must have come upon a small source
of power and of course continued its mission.”
“That can be the truth. The Lords of the Universe must be informed.”
“The mining units, the carriers and the refiners have not been affected, Your Loftiness,”
a meth radiated.
“So I see, fool.” Then, activating another instrument, His Loftiness thought at it, in an
entirely different vein, “Lord Ynos, Madam? I have to make a very grave report . . .
In the Perseus, four scientists and three Navy officers were arguing heatedly;
employing deep-space verbiage not to be found in any dictionary. “Jarve!” Karns called
out, and Hilton joined the group. “Does anything about this planet make any sense to
you?”
“No. But you’re the planetographer. ‘Smatter with it?” “It’s a good three hundred
degrees Kelvin too hot.” “Well, you know it’s loaded with uranexite.”
“That much? The whole crust practically jewelry ore?” “If that’s what the figures say, I’ll
buy it.”
“Buy this, then. Continuous daylight everywhere. Noon June Sol-quality light except
that it’s all in the visible. Frank says it’s from bombardment of a layer of something, and
Frank admits that the whole thing’s impossible.”
“When Frank makes up his mind what ‘something’ is, I’ll take it as a datum.”
“Third thing: there’s only one city on this continent, and it’s protected by a screen that
nobody ever heard of.”
Hilton pondered, then turned to the captain. “Will you please run a search-pattern, sir?
Fine-toothing only the hot spots?”
The planet was approximately the same size as Terra; its atmosphere, except for its
intense radiation, was similar to Terra’s. There were two continents; one immense
girdling ocean. The temperature of the land surface was everywhere about 100º F, that
of the water about 90ºF. Each continent had one city, and both were small. One was
inhabited by what looked like human beings; the other by usuform robots. The human
city was the only cool spot on the entire planet; under its protective dome the
temperature was 71 ºF.
Hilton decided to study the robots first; and asked the captain to take the ship down to
observation range. Sawtelle objected; and continued to object until Hilton started to
order his arrest. Then he said, “I’ll do it, under protest, but I want it on record that I am
doing it against my best judgment.”
“It’s on record,” Hilton said, coldly. “Everything said and done is being, and will
continue to be, recorded.”
The Perseus floated downward “There’s what I want most to see,” Hilton said, finally.
“That big strip-mining operation . . . that’s it . . . hold it!” Then, via throatmike, “Attention,
all scientists! You all know what to do. Start doing it.”
Sandra’s blonde head was very close to Hilton’s brown one as they stared into Hilton’s
plate. “Why, they look like giant armadillos!” she exclaimed.
“More like tanks,” he disagreed, “except that they’ve got legs, wheels and treads-and
arms, cutters, diggers, probes and conveyors-and look at the way those buckets dip
solid rock!”
The fantastic machine was moving very slowly along a bench or shelf that it was
making for itself as it went along. Below it, to its left, dropped the other benches being
made by other mining machines. The machines were not using explosives. Hard though
the ore was, the tools were driven so much harder and were driven with such
tremendous power that the stuff might just as well have been slightly-clayed sand.
Every bit of loosened ore, down to the finest dust, was forced into a conveyor and
thence into the armored body of the machine. There it went into a mechanism whose
basic principles Hilton could not understand. From this monstrosity emerged two
streams of product.
One of these, comprising ninety-nine point nine percent of the input, went out through
another conveyor into the vast hold of a vehicle which, when full and replaced by a
duplicate of itself, went careening madly cross-country to a dump.
The other product, a slow, very small stream of tiny, glistening black pellets, fell into a
one-gallon container being held watchfully by a small machine, more or less like a
three-wheeled motor scooter, which was moving carefully along beside the giant miner.
When this can was almost full another scooter rolled up and, without losing a single
pellet, took over place and function. The first scooter then covered its bucket, clamped
it solidly into a recess designed for the purpose and dashed away toward the city.
Hilton stared slack-jawed at Sandra. She stared back. “Do you make anything of that,
Jarve?”
“Nothing. T’hey’re taking pure uranexite and concentrating-or converting-it a thousand
to one. I hope we’ll be able to do something about it.”
“I hope so, too, Chief; and I’m sure we will.”
“Well, that’s enough for now. You may take us up now, Captain Sawtelle. And Sandy,
will you please call all department heads and their assistants into the conference