beam with a bitter imprecation, shot the visiray out toward the bare, black cone of the
extinct volcano and studied it with care.
“Barkovis, I’ve got a thought!” he snapped into the microphone. “Their stronghold
is in that mountain, and there’s millions of them in there yet, coming out along their
tunnels. They’ve got all the vegetation eaten away for miles, so there’s nothing much left
there to spread a fire if I go to work on that hill, and I’ll probably melt enough water to
put out most of the fires I start. Detail me a couple of ships to drop your fire-foam bombs
on any little blazes that may spread, and I’ll give them so much to worry about at home
that they’ll forget all about Titania.”
The Forlorn Hope darted toward the crater, followed closely by two of the
dazzling globes. They circled the mountain until Stevens found a favorable point of
attack—a stupendous vertical cliff of mingled rock and crystal, upon the base of which
he trained his terrific infra-red projector.
“I’m going to draw a lot of power,” he warned the Titanians then. “I’m giving this
gun everything she’ll take.”
He drove the massive switches in, and as that dull red beam struck the cliff’s
base there was made evident the awful effect of a concentrated beam of real and pure
heat upon such an utterly frigid world. Vast columns of fire roared aloft, helping Stevens,
melting and destroying the very ground as the bodies of the Sedlor in that gigantic ant-
heap burst into flames. Clouds of superheated steam roared upward, condensing into a
hot rain which descended in destructive torrents upon the fastnesses of the centipedes.
As the raging beam ate deeper and deeper into the base of the cliff the mountain itself
began to disintegrate; block after gigantic block breaking off and crashing down into the
flaming, boiling, seething cauldron which was the apex of that ravening beam.
Hour after hour Stevens drove his intolerable weapon into the great mountain,
teeming with Sedlorean life; and hour after hour a group of Titanian spheres stood by,
deluging the surrounding plain with a flood of heavy fumes, through which the holocaust
could not spread for lack of oxygen. Not until the mountain was gone—not until in its
stead there lay a furiously-boiling lake, its flaming surface hundreds of feet below the
level of the plain—did Stevens open his power circuits and point the deformed prow of
the Forlorn Hope toward Titania.
CHAPTER 7 The Return to Ganymede
Must you go back to Ganymede?” Barkovis asked, slowly and thoughtfully. He was
sitting upon a crystal bench beside the fountain, talking with Stevens, who, dressed in
his bulging space-suit, stood near an airlock of the Forlorn Hope. “It seems a shame
that you should face again those unknown, monstrous creatures who so inexcusably
attacked us both without provocation.” “I’m not so keen on it myself, but I can’t see any
other way out of it,” the Terrestrial replied. “We left a lot of our equipment there, you
know; and even if I should build duplicates here, it wouldn’t do us any good. These ten-
nineteens are the most powerful transmitting tubes known when we left Tellus, but even
their fields, dense as they are, can’t hold an ultra-beam together much farther than
about six astronomical units. So you see we can’t possibly reach our friends from here
with this tube; and your system of beam transmission won’t hold anything together even
that far, and won’t work on any wave shorter than Roeser’s Rays. We may run into
some more of those little spheres, though, and I don’t like the prospect. I wonder if we
couldn’t plate a layer of that mirror of yours onto the Hope, and carry along a few of
those bombs ? By the way, what is that explosive—or is it something beyond Tellurian
chemistry?”
“Its structure should be clear to you, although you probably could not prepare it
upon Tellus because of your high temperature. It is nothing but nitrogen—twenty-six
atoms of nitrogen combined to form one molecule of what you would call—N-twenty
six?”
“Wow!” Stevens whistled. “Crystalline, pentavalent nitrogen—no wonder it’s
violent!”
“We could, of course, cover your vessel with the mirror, but I am afraid that it
would prove of little value. The plates are so hot that it would soon volatilize.”
“Not necessarily,” argued Stevens. “We could live in number one life-boat, and
shut off the heat everywhere else. The life-boats are insulated from the structure proper,
and the inner and outer walls of the structure are insulated from each other. With only
the headquarters lifeboat warm, the outer wall could be held pretty close to zero
absolute.”
“That is true. The bombs, of course, are controlled by radio, and therefore may
be attached to the outer wall of your vessel. We shall be glad to do these small things
for you.”
The heaters of the Forlorn Hope were shut off, and as soon as the outer shell
had cooled to Titanian temperature a corps of mechanics set to work. A machine very
like a concrete mixer was rolled up beside the steel vessel, and into its capacious maw
were dumped boxes and barrels of dry ingredients and many cans of sparkling liquid.
The resultant paste was pumped upon the steel plating in a sluggish, viscid stream,
which spread out into a thick and uniform coating beneath the flying rollers of the skilled
Titanian workmen. As it hardened, the paste smoothed magically into the perfect mirror
which covered the space-vessels of the satellite; and a full dozen of the mirrored
explosive bombs of this strange people were hung in the racks already provided.
“Once again I must caution you concerning those torpedoes,” Barkovis warned
Stevens. “If you use them all, very well, but do not try to take even one of them into any
region where it is very hot, for it will explode arid demolish your vessel. If you do not use
them, destroy them before you descend into the hot atmosphere of Ganymede. The
mirror will volatilize harmlessly at the temperature of melting mercury, but the torpedoes
must be destroyed. Once more, Tellurians, we thank you for what you have done, and
wish you well.”
“Thanks a lot for your help—we still owe you something,” replied Stevens. “If
either of your power-plants go sour on you again, or if you need any more built, be sure
to let us know—you can come close enough to the inner planets now on your own beam
to talk to us on the ultra-communicator. We’ll be glad to help you any way we can—and
we may call on you for help again. Goodbye, Barkovis—good-by, all Titania!”
He made his way through the bitterly cold shop into the control-room of their
lifeboat, and while he was divesting himself of his heavy suit Nadia lifted the Forlorn
Hope into the blue-green sky of Titan, accompanied by an escort of the mirrored globes.
Well clear of the atmosphere of the satellite, the Terrestrial cruiser shot forward at
normal acceleration, while the Titanian vessels halted and wove a pattern of blue and
golden rays in salute to the departing guests.
“Well, girl-friend, we’re off—on a long trek, too, ‘s what I mean.”
“Said Wun Long Hop, the Chinese pee-lo,” Nadia agreed. “Sure everything’s all
x, big boy?”
“To nineteen decimals,” he declared. “You couldn’t squeeze another frank into
our accumulators with a proof-bar, and since they’re sending us all the power we want
to draw, we won’t need to touch our batteries or tap our own beam until we’re almost to
Jupiter. To cap the climax, what it takes to make big medicine on those spherical friends
of ours, we’ve got. We’re not sitting on top of the world, ace —we’re perched on the
exact apex of the entire universe!”
“How long is it going to take ?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t figured it yet, but it’ll be beau-coup days,” and the two
wanderers from far-distant Earth settled down to the routine of a long and uneventful
journey.
They gave Saturn and his spectacular rings a wide berth and sped on, with ever-
increasing velocity. Past the outer satellites, on and on, the good ship Forlorn Hope flew
into the black-and-brilliant depths of interplanetary space. Saturn was an ever-
diminishing disk beneath them: above them were Jupiter’s thin crescent, growing ever
larger and more bright, and the Monarch of the Solar System, remaining almost
stationary day after day, increasing steadily in apparent diameter and in brilliance.
Although the voyage from Titan to Ganymede was long, it was not monotonous,
for there was much work to be done in the designing and fabrication of the various units
which were to comprise the ultra-radio transmitting station. In the various compartments
of the Forlorn Hope there were sundry small motors, blowers, coils, condensers, force-
field generators, and other items which Stevens could use with little or no alteration; but
for the most part he had to build everything himself. Thus it was that time passed