These thoughts went through Towers’ mind in rapid succession, and he was only vaguely aware of Cartwright walking down the corridor, the visor of his armor down, to talk to the men at the fusion guns. Then an obvious fact penetrated to Towers’ consciousness, and he called, “Did they touch your armor?”
“Yes, sir.”
Before Towers could say more, half-a-dozen blue-green forms appeared on all sides of the Officer of the Watch. The multiple short-range fusion guns let loose a murderous burst.
The attack was over as fast as it started. But amongst the sprawled attackers lay an unusually large shell. The Officer of the Watch, protected from the fire by his armor, picked up the shell and threw it the length of the corridor. It apparently hit the net near the door to the equipment locker, bounced back into sight on the screen, and split in half when it struck the deck.
Towers studied it coldly.
Each half of this shell was as big as an ordinary shell.
Cartwright raised his visor and looked questioningly at Towers.
Towers adjusted the screen, and was fairly sure he could see traces of some dark substance along the line of the break in the shell.
“Why not walk down and just see if there isn’t something like glue along the break in that shell?”
Cartwright walked down the corridor, filled the screen, and said, “Yes, sir. There’s a hardened streak of some kind. Shall I smash the pieces?”
Towers thought it over. Every few minutes, there seemed to be some new example of craft and cunning. The teleports looked more formidable by the hour. When opportunity offered, they wiped out whole military commands at once. Against stiffer opposition, they contented themselves with establishing a toehold, and expanding it by steps into a bridgehead. Towers had started out feeling an underlying sympathy he often felt for the objects of Centran Planetary Integration. But by now, the sympathy had congealed into loathing. Now there was this clever new stunt with the oversize shell. Had they tried this before, and found that the victims carried the broken pieces with other rubbish into another part of the ship, and a new section was opened to attack? Or was it a distraction, to draw attention from the fact that Cartwright’s armor would provide easy access to whatever part of the ship that armor was in? Or was there some other clever booby trap involved?
“Better leave it where it is,” said Towers. “I don’t see that they gain anything by it.”
“Sir, I’m just wondering, can they sense the relative positions of two objects they’ve ‘learned’?”
“Maybe. But I don’t think that’s going to help them.”
“But, if they could, there might be an advantage in introducing a number of such objects into a ship. Something similar to triangulation may be involved.”
Towers nodded. “Maybe that was their reason. But they aren’t going to get beyond this part of the ship if we can help it.”
“In that case, sir, the sooner I get out of this armor, the better.”
Towers’ eyes narrowed, then he smiled. “And if they can tell the relative position of different parts of that armor, when do you suppose the next batch of them will come through?”
“When I’ve got it about half off. I won’t be able to defend myself, and if the fusion guns fire, I’ll get hit, too.”
“Right.”
“Sir, suppose we put on masks, and fill the corridor with chlorine gas?”
“First, we don’t know how fast it would affect them. Second, it would surprise them, but probably not so much that they couldn’t get away—to spread the warning.”
“It might make them more wary about coming through.”
“That’s the third reason why we shouldn’t do it.”
Towers considered this latest predicament. Before Lieutenant Cartwright could go back into the part of the ship that was safe, he had to get out of the armor. If he didn’t, any part of the ship he went to would be unsafe. But to get out of the armor meant to open himself to attack.
“Sir, if you’d have them send up another suit, I could take this off piece by piece—”
“And have them come through when the piece you’ve got off is the breastplate? No, we’ll get you out of there, but not dead, if we can help it.”
At Towers’ instructions, a false deck was welded into place behind the fusion guns. The fusion guns then drew back behind it, and two new nets were put up, in front of the guns. Cartwright cut away the old net, stepped up on the low false deck, hesitated, sat down inside the nearest net, and suddenly his feet were out of sight, then his legs, and he squirmed and twisted and then he was completely inside the claustrophobic space that had been left open under one side of the false deck. Since there was no room under there for anyone else, a teleport who came through there would wind up with the false deck embedded in his body. On the other hand, if he came through overhead, the false deck would serve as a shield.
As Lieutenant Cartwright squirmed out of his breastplate, there was an earsplitting yell, a shower of darts, a shell hit the first barrier, a blue-green form materialized behind it, to scatter an armload of shells, and the corridor was filled with the crisscrossing radiance of the fusion beams. The corridor was a shambles when the attack was over. A technician in armor cut through the lower edge of the net, the fusion guns made a barrier of energy overhead, and Cartwright crawled back to safety.
All that, Towers told himself, to get one man free of the attention of the “natives.”
As soon as the men were safely out of the corridor, the ship was treated as if it had suffered heavy battle damage. The air was pumped out of the active equipment locker, the corridor, and all adjacent parts of the ship, back to the reinforcing walls. The locker and corridor were then completely cut out, and, plate by plate, they were cut up and melted down, in space. At the same time, in a nearby landing-boat, a nervous surgical team dissected a number of the native dead.
While this was going on, a total of twenty-six more teleports appeared, in and around the corridor that was being disassembled, and were at once blown apart by their own internal pressure. But in the landing-boat where the dissection was carried out, nothing interfered except the surgeons’ uneasy urge to look over their shoulders.
Towers now went to a separate landing-boat, to talk to Glossip.
Glossip, to Towers’ surprise, was beaming broadly.
“It’s all relative, Towers,” he explained. “When you expect quick victory, a little delay seems like a setback. When you expect to be slaughtered, if you come out somewhere near, even, it seems like a victory. In this case, I was prepared to be finished off, following which the planet would have been subjected to methodical bombardment with nuclear weapons until that race of teleports was as close to extinction as brute force and persistence would bring them. Instead, that piece of advice of yours opens up new possibilities. It also demonstrates that Centra was right to make the alliance with Earth.”
Towers looked puzzled. “Was there any question about that?”
Glossip shrugged. “You’ve been busy, solving problems that some people don’t know exist. Therefore, you’ve missed a few points that we can’t overlook much longer. After this is over with, if it can be solved, you may find yourself up against a tougher proposition.”
“I never hope to see a tougher proposition than these teleports.”
“Well, Towers,” said Glossip, smiling, “if you’re able to beat them, it stands to reason that you are a tougher proposition.”
Towers, puzzled and vaguely exasperated, decided to drag the conversation back onto the subject.
“Sir, that’s what I’d like to get cleared up: How this collection of frustrated conquerors is going to be jammed back onto their own planet.”
Glossip’s air of well-being vanished.
“Jammed back onto their planet? What do you mean, Towers? They haven’t got off it yet.”
“Yes, sir. But unfortunately, they seem to have thought that out in the beginning, before anyone was aware they existed.” He described the scout ship, with shell stuck to it in such a way that a landing would break the shell. He described his and Logan’s idea of how that had come about, and added, “Maybe Logan and I are wrong, but—”
“No,” said Glossip. “It fits in with what’s happened here. That’s exactly what they would think of.”
“Well, sir,” said Towers, “we should know soon. Major Logan is tracing the rest of those scout ships. If we find, for instance, that one of them has landed on an oversize, warm, wet, roughly Earth-type planet, and if the scout ship has a few odd bits of shell stuck to its underside, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find, before long, that any other ship that touches down there is likely to suffer a sudden disappearance of the crew and weapons.”