ever more powerful weapons of offense; the Chlorans ceased their fruitless attacks upon
the central dome and concentrated all their offensive power into two semicircular arcs,
which they directed vertically downward upon the outer ring of the Valeronian works in an
incessant and methodical flood of energy.
They could not pierce the defensive shields against Valeron’s massed power, but they
could and did bring into being a vast annular lake of furiously boiling lava, into which the
outer ring of fortresses began slowly to crumble and dissolve. This method of
destruction, while slow, was certain; and grimly, pertinaciously, implacably, the Chlorans
went about the business of reducing Valeron’s only citadel.
The Bardyle wondered audibly how the enemy could possibly maintain indefinitely an
attack so profligate of energy, but he soon learned that there were at least four of the
floating fortresses engaged in the undertaking. Occasionally the two creations then
attacking were replaced by two precisely similar structures, presumably to return to
Chlora in order to renew their supplies of the substance, whatever it was, from the
atomic disintegration of which they derived their incomprehensible power.
And slowly, contesting stubbornly and bitterly every foot of ground lost, the forces of
Valeron were beaten back under the relentless, never-ceasing attack of the Chloran
monstrosities-back and ever back toward their central dome as ring after ring of the
outlying fortifications slagged down into that turbulently seething, that incandescently
flaming lake of boiling lava.
19 TO THE RESCUE
Valeron was making her last stand. Her back was against the wall. The steadily
contracting ring of Chloran force had been driven inward until only one thin line of fortified
works lay between it and the great dome covering the city itself. Within a week at most,
perhaps within days, that voracious flood of lava would lick into and would dissolve that
last line of defense. The what of Valeron?
All the scientists of the planet had toiled and had studied, day and night, but to no avail.
Each new device developed to halt the march of the encroaching constricting band of
destruction had been nullified in the instant of its first trial.
“They must know every move we make, to block us so promptly,” Quedrin Radnor had
mused one day. “Since they certainly have no visiray viewpoints of material substance
within our dome, they must be able to operate a spy ray using only the narrow gravity
band, a thing we have never been able to accomplish. If they can project such viewpoints
of pure force through such a narrow band, may they not be able to project a full
materialization and thus destroy us? But, no, that band is-must be-altogether too narrow
for that.”
Stirred by these thoughts he had built detectors to announce the appearance of any
nongravitational forces in the gravity band and had learned that his fears were only too
well founded. While the enemy could not project through the open band any forces
sufficiently powerful to do any material damage, they were thus in position to forestall
any move which the men of Valeron made to ward off their inexorably approaching doom.
Far beneath the surface of the ground, in a room which was not only sealed but was
surrounded with every possible safeguard, nine men sat at a long table, the Bardyle at its
head.
” . . and nothing can be done?” the coordinator was asking. “There is no possible way of
protecting the edges of the screens?”
“None.” Radnor’s voice was flat, his face and body alike were eloquent of utter fatigue.
He had driven himself to the point of collapse, and all his labor had proved useless.
“Without solid anchorages we cannot hold them-as the ground is fused they give way.
When the fused area reaches the dome the end will come. The outlets of our absorbers
will also be fused, and with no possible method of dissipating the energy being
continuously radiated into the dome we shall all die, practically instantaneously.”
“But I judge you are trying something new, from the sudden cutting off of nearly all our
weight,” stated another.
“Yes. I have closed the gravity band until only enough force can get through to keep us in
place on the planet, in a last attempt to block their spy rays so that we can try one last
resort . . .” He broke off as an intense red light suddenly flared into being upon a panel.
“No; even that is useless. See that red light? That is the pilot light of a detector upon the
gravity band. The Chlorans are still watching us. We can do nothing more, for if we
close that band any tighter we shall leave Valeron entirely and shall float away, to die in
space.”
As that bleak announcement was uttered the councilors sat back limply in their seats.
Nothing was said-what was there to say? After all, the now seemingly unavoidable end
was not unexpected. Not a man at that table had really in his heart thought it possible for
peaceful Valeron to triumph against the superior war-craftiness of Chlora.
They sat there, staring unseeing into empty air, when suddenly in that air there
materialized Seaton’s projection. Since its reception has already been related, nothing
need be said of it except that it was the Bardyle himself who was the recipient of that
terrific wave of mental force. As soon as the Terrestrial had made clear his intentions
and his desires, Radnor leaped to his feet, a man transformed.
“A laboratory of radiation!” he exclaimed, his profound exhaustion forgotten in a blaze of
new hope. “Not only shall I lead him to such a laboratory, but my associates and I shall
be only too glad to do his bidding in every possible way.”
Followed closely by the visitor, Radnor hurried buoyantly along a narrow hall and into a
large room in which, stacked upon shelves, lying upon benches and tables, and even
piled indiscriminately upon the floor, there was every conceivable type and kind of
apparatus for the generation and projection of etheric forces.
Seaton’s flashing glance swept once around the room, cataloguing and classifying the
heterogeneous collection. Then, while Radnor looked on in a daze of incredulous
astonishment, that quasi-solid figure of force made tangible wrought what was to the
Valeronian a scientific miracle. It darted here and there with a speed almost impossible
for the eye to follow, seizing tubes, transformers, coils, condensers, and other items of
equipment, connecting them together with unbelievable rapidity into a mechanism at
whose use the bewildered Radnor, able physicist though he was, could not even guess.
The mechanical educator finished, Seaton’s image donned one of its sets of multiple
headphones and placed another upon the unresisting head of his host. Then into
Radnor’s already reeling mind there surged an insistent demand for his language, and
almost immediately the headsets were tossed aside.
“There, that’s better!” Seaton-for the image was, to all intents and purposes, Seaton
himself-exclaimed. “Now that we can talk to each other we’ll soon make those Chlorans
wish that they had stayed at home.”
“But they are watching everything you do,” protested Radnor, “and we cannot block them
out without cutting off our gravity entirely. They will therefore be familiar with any
mechanism we may construct and will be able to protect themselves against it.”
“They just think they will,” grimly. “I can’t close the gravity band without disaster, any
more than you could, but r can find any spy ray they can use and send back along it a jolt
that’ll burn their eyes out. You see, there’s a lot of stuff down on the edge of the fourth
order that neither you nor the Chlorans know anything about yet, because you haven’t
had enough thousands of years to study it.”
While he was talking, Seaton had been furiously at work upon a small generator, and
now he turned it on.
“If they can see through that,” he grinned, “they’re a lot smarter than I think they are.
Even if they’re bright enough to have figured out what I was doing while I was doing it, it
won’t do them any good, because this outfit will scramble any beam they can send
through that band.”
“I must bow to your superior knowledge, of course,” Radnor said gravely, “but I should
like to ask one question. You are working a full materialization through less than a tenth
of the gravity band-something that has always been considered impossible. Is there no
danger that the Chlorans may analyze your patterns and thus duplicate your feat?”
“Not a chance,” Seaton assured him positively. “This stuff I am using is on a tight beam,
so tight that it is proof against analysis or interference. It took the Norlaminians-and
they’re a race of real thinkers—over eight thousand years to go from the beams you and
the Chlorans are using down to what I’m showing you. Therefore I’m not afraid that the
opposition will pick it up in the next week or two. But we’d better get busy in a big way.