course by the force of the blast, so that instead of striking the Forlorn Hope in direct
central impact, its head merely touched the apex of the mirror-plated wedge. That touch
was enough. There was another appalling concussion, another blinding glare, and the
entire front quarter of the Terrestrial vessel had gone to join the shattered globes.
Between the point of explosion and the lifeboats there had been many channels
of insulation, many bulkheads, many airbreaks, and compartment after compartment of
accumulator cells. These had borne the brunt of the explosion, so that the control room
was unharmed, and Stevens swung his communicator rapidly through the damaged
portions of the vessel.
“How badly are we hurt, Steve—can we make it to Ganymede ?” Nadia was
staring over his shoulder into the plate, studying with him the pictures of destruction
there portrayed as he flashed the projector from compartment to compartment.
“We’re hurt—no fooling—but it might have been a lot worse,” he replied, as he
completed the survey. “We’ve lost about all of our accumulators, but we can land on our
own beam, and landing power is all we want, I think. You see, we’re drifting straight for
where Ganymede will be, and we’d better cut out every bit of power we’re using, even
the heaters, until we get there. This lifeboat will hold heat for quite a while, and I’d rather
get pretty cold than meet any more of that gang. I figured eight hours just before they
met us, and we were just about drifting then. Say seven hours blind.”
“But can’t they detect us anyway? They may have sent out a call, you know.”
“If we aren’t using any power for anything, their electromagnetics are the only
things we’ll register on, and they’re mighty short-range finders. Even if they should get
that close to us, they’ll probably think we’re meteoric, since we’ll be dead to their other
instruments. Luckily we’ve got lots of air, so the chemical purifiers can handle it without
power. I’ll shut off everything and we’ll drift it. Couldn’t do much of anything,
anyway—even our shop out there won’t hold air. But we can have light. We’ve got
acetylene emergency lamps, you know, and we don’t need to economize on oxygen.”
“Perhaps we’d better run in the dark. Remember what you told me about their
possible visirays, and that you’ve got only two bombs left.”
“All x; that’d be better, at that. If I forget it, remind me to blow up those two before
we hit the atmosphere of Ganymede, will you?” He opened all the power switches, and,
every source of ethereal vibrations cut off, the Forlorn Hope drifted slowly on, now
appearing forlorn indeed.
Seven hours dragged past; seven age-long hours during which the two sat tense,
expecting they knew not what, talking only at intervals and in subdued tones. Stevens
then snapped on the communicator beam just long enough to take an observation upon
Ganymede. Several such brief glimpses were taken; then, after a warning word to his
companion, he sent out and exploded the nitrogen bombs. He then threw on the power,
and the vessel leaped toward the satellite under full acceleration. Close to the
atmosphere it slanted downward in a screaming, fifteen-hundred-mile dive; and soon
the mangled wedge dropped down into the little canyon which for so long had been
“home”.
“Well, colonel, home again!” Stevens exulted as he neutralized the controls.
“There’s the falls, our power plant, the catapults, V everything. Now, unless something
interrupts us again, we’ll run up our radio tower and give Brandon the long yell.”
“How much more have you got to do before you can start sending?”
“Not an awful lot. Everything’s built—all I’ve got to do is assemble it. I should be
able to do it easily in a week. Hope nothing else happens—if I drag you into any more
such messes as those we’ve just been getting out of by the skin of our teeth I’ll begin to
wish that we had started out at first to drift it back to Tellus in the Hope. Let’s see how
much time, we’ve got. We should start shooting one day after an eclipse, so that we’ll
have five days to send. You see, we don’t want to point our beam too close to Jupiter or
to any of the large satellites, because the enemy might live there and might intercept it,
and that’d be just too bad for us. We had an eclipse yesterday—so one week from
today, at sunrise, I start shooting.”
“But Earth’s an evening star now; you can’t see it in the morning.”
“I’m not going to aim at Tellus. I’m shooting at Brandon, and he’s never there for
more than a week or two at a stretch. They’re prowling around out in space somewhere
almost all the time.”
“Then how can you possibly hope to hit them ?” , “It may be quite a job of
hunting, but not as bad as you might think. They probably aren’t much, if any, outside
the orbit of Mars, and they usually stay within a couple of million kilometers or so of the
Ecliptic, so we’ll start at the sun and shoot our beam in a spiral to cover that field. We
ought to be able to hit them inside of twelve hours, but if we don’t, we’ll widen our spiral
and keep on trying until we do hit them.”
“Heavens, Steve! Are you planning on telegraphing steadily for days at a time?”
“Sure, but not by hand, of course—I’ll have an automatic sender and automatic
pointers.”
Stevens had at his command a very complete machine-shop, he had an ample
supply of power, and all that remained for him to do was to assemble the parts which he
had built during the long journey from Titan to Ganymede. Therefore at sunrise of the
designated day he was ready, and, with Nadia hanging breathless over his shoulder he
closed the switch, a toothed wheel engaged a delicate interrupter, and a light sounder
began its strident chatter.
“Ganymede point oh four seven ganymede point oh four seven ganymede point
oh four seven . . .” endlessly the message was poured out into the ether, carried by a
tight beam of ultra-vibrations and driven by forces sufficient to propel it well beyond the
opposite limits of the orbit of Mars.
“What does it say? I can’t read code.”
Stevens translated the brief message, but Nadia remained unimpressed.
“But it doesn’t say anything!” she protested. “It isn’t addressed to anybody, it isn’t
signed—it doesn’t tell anybody anything about anything.”
“It’s all there, ace. You see, since the beam is moving sidewise very rapidly at
that range and we’re shooting at a small target, the message has to be very short or
they won’t get it all while the beam’s on ’em—it isn’t as though we were broadcasting. It
doesn’t need any address, because nobody but the Sirius can receive it—except
possibly the Jovians. They’ll know who’s sending it without any signature. It tells them
that Ganymede wants to receive a message on the ultra-band centering on forty-seven
thousandths. Isn’t that enough ?”
“Maybe. But suppose some of them live right here on Ganymede—you’ll be
shooting right through the ground all night—or suppose that even if they don’t live here,
that they can find our beam some way? Or suppose that Brandon hasn’t got his
machine built yet, or suppose that it isn’t turned on when our beam passes them, or
suppose they’re asleep or something then ? It looks like there’s a lot of things that might
happen.”
“Not so many, ace—your first objection is the only one that hasn’t got more holes
in it than a sieve, so I’ll take it first. Since our beam is only a meter in diameter here and
doesn’t spread much in the first few million kilometers, the chance of direct reception by
the enemy, even if they do live here on Ganymede, is infinitesimally small. But I don’t
believe that they live here—at least, they certainly didn’t land on this satellite. As you
suggest, however, it is conceivable that they may have detector screens delicate
enough to locate our beam at a distance; but since in all probability that means a
distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers, I think it highly improbable. We’ve got
to take the same risk anyway, no matter what we do, whenever we start to use any kind
of driving power, so there’s no use worrying about it.
As for your last two objections, I know Brandon and I know Westfall. Brandon will
have receivers built that will take in any wave possible of propagation, and Westfall, the
cautious old egg, will have them running twenty four hours a day, with automatic
recorders, finders, and everything else that Brandon can invent—and believe me,
sweetheart, that’s a lot of stuff!”
“It’s wonderful, the way you three men are,” replied Nadia thoughtfully, reading
between the lines of Stevens’ utterance. “They knew that you were on the Arcturus, of